THE DEATH CULT ROBS, THEN KILLS THE TAXPAYERS
[This work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-sharealike 4.0 international license. Originally published in August, 2020 by Keith M. Judge in Chicago. This is a free culture license! If you like what you’ve read and would like to support the author, subscribe at Patreon or Substack!]
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today.
Before FDR adopted the mantle of President of The United States a second time, he purged his administration of Nazi sympathizers, and before a roaring crowd, identified the engineers of the hate-filled, fear-mongering, cowardly ideology that guided them: “organized money . . . . the old enemies of peace,” who “consider The Government of The United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs.” Two years later, in a Message to Congress on The Concentration of Economic Power, he clarified his statements and described “private power” as the source of the hate, fear and violence that wrecked ruin across the globe in the 1930s and 40s.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
Today, private power has purchased governments around the world, fomented hate and fear, encouraged working people to kill each other, funded wars, systematically and regularly displaced communities and entire nations, engaged in monopolistic, market practices that have debased our quality of life, siphoned taxpayer money from the public trust for their own benefit, obliterated the self-regulatory homeostasis of planet Earth and condemned the world’s young to a future of certain Hell and inevitable doom. COVID19 is just one symptom of the virus of World Capital, and the plundering of public coffers is just one strategy in Corporate America’s war against The American People.
Zach Carter, Senior Editor for Huffington Post, describes the first pandemic-related bailout package with meticulous and unflattering detail.
The emergency coronavirus legislation . . . represents a transfer of wealth and power to the super rich from the rest of us, with the support of both political parties . . . the new law would establish a $4.5 trillion corporate bailout fund overseen by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, with few substantive constraints. Some outlets are reporting this as a $500 billion fund, but $425 billion of that can be leveraged 10 times over by the Federal Reserve, resulting in a multi-trillion-dollar program . . . Bailout money will flow to the shareholders of large corporations, otherwise known as rich people. The oversight terms that Democrats secured are purely cosmetic, replicating the toothless provisions of the 2008 bank bailout that enabled watchdogs to report abuse but not actually prevent or rectify it.
Thus far, Democrats, Republicans, Congress and The Trump Administration have all agreed, for the most part, to make a gift of roughly the annual measure of goods and services produced in The United States, 19.4 trillion dollars of taxpayer money, to powerful American corporations and some of the wealthiest people in the world: 4.5 trillion in the initial “CARES” bailout package, 2.9 trillion in the second installment of funding for the PPP program in that package, and over 12 trillion dollars that The Federal Reserve is quietly, yet brazenly stealing from workers and the middle class before they hand it to the rich and powerful. If The HEROES Act isn’t “dead on arrival” in The Senate, the combined total of bailout funds disbursed by The Federal Reserve would amount to 22.4 trillion dollars.
These numbers are as abstract as they are large, and the volume of deceit and propaganda in our politics and media only complicates our discourse. In The DDR, responsible journalism was tortured to death in a small, dark room, under a single, dangling bulb. In The United States, responsible journalism is buried in a trash heap of confusing, postmodern, passive-aggressive, fallacious, facile, deflective, gaudy, intrusive, indulgent, brainwashing lies, outlined in radioactive neon, blaring like mad sirens. Articles discussing the bailout package quote several wildly conflicting figures: 500 billion, 2 trillion, etcetera. 2 trillion is a bogus figure, but 500 billion is in the language of the bill, and since all “too-big-to-fail” banks in The United States are required to keep only 9 percent of capital on hand in case of a panic, the remaining 91 percent may be invested ten times. The multiple, 10, is the reciprocal of the aforementioned percentile minus one.
That’s the actual formula, which is crazy, because the multiplier climbs as the percentile of capital in reserve decreases. That’s the sort of contrived, voodoo accounting endorsed by decrepit patriarchs and the priestly children of Mammon, the day traders and financiers who rely on the perpetuation of widespread, credible self-doubt to succeed in this society, or the lie that market activities are generally beneficial for the vast majority of people. That lie is immediately and unconsciously preferable to the harsh reality that we’re all regularly being cheated, manipulated and violently extorted by members of the same species, our neighbors.
The subject was neatly summarized in The New York Times.
The Fed could simply print the money to back that lending, but it avoids taking on credit risk, so it asks for Treasury funding to insure against losses. But those taxpayer dollars can be leveraged: Because the Fed expects most borrowers to pay back, it does not need one-for-one support. As a result, a mere $10 billion from Treasury can prop up $100 billion in Fed lending. And voilà — the $454 billion Congress dedicated to Fed programs in the aid bill can be multiplied many times. A separate $46 billion in the package will go to specific industries.
Detractors have argued that taxpayer money isn’t buttressing loans to corporations, but if taxpayer money isn’t backing these loans, what is? These highly indebted institutions are mired in insubstantial financial products that amount to little more than a pyramid scheme, and we’re the dupes at the bottom of the pyramid. The language of the bill was made clear in the Paycheck Protection Program Information Sheet for Lenders.
Are these loans guaranteed by the SBA? Yes, the SBA guarantees 100% of the outstanding balance, and that guarantee is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.
The language of the bill was also made clear in the Paycheck Protection Program Information Sheet for Borrowers.
Loan amounts will be forgiven as long as: the loan proceeds are used to cover payroll costs, and most mortgage interest, rent, and utility costs over the 8 week period after the loan is made; and employee and compensation levels are maintained.
Loan amounts will be forgiven by the full faith and credit of the United States.
This won’t bankrupt our country; that concept is largely untenable. The rules of finance are a collective hallucination, and our government writes the rules. The only way The United States could go bankrupt is if our government decides it’s bankrupt. Fractional reserves enable banks to immediately repay their loans while retaining about 90 percent of the liquidity spontaneously generated from the “money multiplier” the banking system uses to grow capital, to the chagrin of student loan borrowers. Banks that issue loans, however, might go bankrupt, and if enough go under, politicians could use the collapse of the banking system as an excuse to dismantle state and local governments, or defund Federal programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, or just bail the banks out again. Right now the beneficiaries of these loans are busy gambling with our money and sticking it up their noses in marbled bathrooms as they curse the cucks, celebrate police brutality and cackle at racist jokes, or just look the other way, because those are the sort of people who aren’t above grand larceny on a scale tantamount to several generations of human potential.
Either that, or they’re homicidally aloof.
THE BIPARTISAN PLUNDERING OF PUBLIC COFFERS
NPR described the initial bailout bill as “the largest rescue package in American History and a major bipartisan victory for Congress.” CNN said the bailout “stands as the largest emergency aid package in US history. It represents a massive financial injection into a struggling economy with provisions aimed at helping American workers.” The Washington Post described the bill as “flooding the economy with capital to revive businesses and households that have been knocked off course.” NBC said “The legislation, which passed unanimously in the Senate on Wednesday, will provide billions of dollars in relief for struggling industries.” The New York Times chastised Democrats who either opposed the bill or doubted its merits, then, after the bill passed, The Times congratulated Democrats for their “resistance,” although it remains unclear what they resisted, because it sure as shit wasn’t The New York Times. Both detractors and adherents of the bailout package described the bill as bipartisan, and the bill outlines an almost incomprehensible redistribution of wealth from America’s most humble to the wealthiest creatures in the world, all during a public health crises that has spilled over into societal, cultural, economic and political crises. Fox News lauded the bill’s hypothetical benefit to small businesses and emphasized the 349 billion dollar Paycheck Protection Program: “A number of provisions in the CARES Act aim to help struggling businesses and their employees who are laid off out of necessity. But perhaps the most helpful is the $349 billion in forgivable small business loans.” Breitbart mirrored whatever bullshit Fox was dishing out at the time.
Originally, Paycheck Protection Program loans were only available to companies that staffed under 500 employees, but The Federal Reserve took it upon itself to increase that threshold to 1,500 employees, although no law allows The Federal Reserve to alter legislation. This is one of several examples of unprecedented, flagrant abuses of Constitutional Law — not to mention Common Law, or the unwritten laws of basic human decency — unilaterally adopted by The Federal Reserve and the current administration.
The intermediary through which 7.4 trillion dollars(1) of forgivable loans backed by the “full faith and credit of The United States” passed before it was disbursed was Secretary of Treasury, Steve Mnuchin. “We ensured in the bill that any tax dollars given to industry goes first and foremost to worker paychecks and benefits, not CEO bonuses, stock buybacks or dividends,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed on the floor of the House of Representatives. Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia wrote a provision into the bill that instructed Steve Mnuchin to endeavor to retain 90 percent of the workforce, reduce incomes for executives earning over 3 million dollars per annum, implement bans on outsourcing and include protections for collective bargaining agreements, but since when has any Goldman Sachs banker endeavored to help working people?
Democrats also included provisions for an “Oversight Commission” of five congressionally-appointed watchdogs and an inspector general appointed by The Executive Branch; the same stipulations included in the unprincipled, legislative failure known as The 2008 TARP bill. Trump’s pick for Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery was Brian D. Miller, who earned his position by helping Trump stonewall The Government Accountability Office after the charlatan-in-chief ransomed Ukrainian military aid for dirt on Joe Biden. Congressional appointees to The Oversight Commission find themselves in the unfortunate position of observing rampant corruption as it unfolds while remaining wholly incapacitated in their power to change it. “Each member of the commission has the ability to raise issues they think are of particular importance, at least to talk about those issues publicly and try to raise public attention,” said Bharat Ramamurti, the one, lonely dude appointed to The Oversight Commission before Steve Mnuchin flushed 4.5 trillion dollars of future U.S. tax revenue down the shit hole that is The Federal Reserve in a little over two weeks. In a letter sent to Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome H. Powell, the lone watchdog chosen to oversee the entire bailout process, armed with the awesome, but ubiquitous right to notify the press, Mr. Ramamurti humbly requested — of all things — accountability.
The public deserves to know which companies are receiving taxpayer-backed lending through the Fed and on what terms, and to be able to monitor what those companies do after receiving taxpayer support.
Mitch McConnel called it, “emergency relief.” Nancy Pelosi called it a “victory. . . for America’s workers.” Who decides the beneficiaries of 4.5 trillion dollars of easily forgiven loan stimulus? The CARES Act provided nothing in the way of repercussions for corporations that abuse the public trust, and The Ruling American Establishment would have us believe The Fed’s conduct during its two-and-a-half week fire sale on forgivable SBA loans was adequately corralled by stern admonishments and cautionary advice.
Mr. Grunwald, with Politico, take it away . . .
But the complex language and multiple caveats in the section of the CARES Act devoted to Federal Reserve programs leave significant room for the central bank’s leaders and their partners at the Treasury to structure the assistance however they want.
And while the CARES Act does seem to limit companies that receive direct loans through Fed programs from buying back stock, paying dividends, or raising executive pay for a year, it allows Mnuchin to waive those provisions as long as he explains his rationale to Congress.
THE FEDERAL RESERVE DEPUTIZES BLACKROCK INVESTMENTS, LLC
The Executive Branch, aided by Congress, is funneling tax revenue through an extra-constitutional banking entity built on a bog of lies and pomp into the pockets of the nation’s wealthiest. The Fed is doing more than loaning the country’s future to corporations. It’s at its old game of easing quantitatively: purchasing toxic assets to slap a fresh coat of gloss on bank portfolios bulging with elaborate cons, get-rich-quick schemes and government-sanctioned extortion. The United States government has willfully absorbed significant financial risk from unscrupulous spendthrifts that built their reputations on their ability to pillage the country under an umbrella of morally bankrupt statutes written by a legislative body comprised of company stooges.
For the second time in its history, The Federal Reserve delegated authority over bailout funds to the shadow finance conglomerate, BlackRock, one of several financial players to emerge with a net profit from the 2008 recession after the firm was selected to oversee the distribution of 130 billion dollars of stimulus. Since 2008, BlackRock has increased the dollar value of its assets portfolio by 5.2 trillion, or 400 percent in 11 years. More recently, the company was handed 750 billion dollars of our money to invest in imaginary financial products built on the premise of debt creation, and not one line in The CARES Act prevents the predatory entity from purchasing its own financial products. In another letter written to The Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome H. Powell, a coalition of 30 organizations warns of the obvious danger to public oversight when private and public actors feed from the same trough.
By giving BlackRock full control of this debt buyout program, the Fed is further entwining the roles of government and private actors. In doing so, it makes BlackRock even more systemically important to the financial system. Yet BlackRock is not subject to the regulatory scrutiny of even smaller systemically important financial institutions.
The Federal Reserve also unilaterally removed language from the “Main Street New Loan Facility” program that limited financial relief to companies struggling “due to the exigent circumstances presented by the coronavirus disease.” Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette confessed that the change in language was executed at the behest of The Trump Administration to “ensure that there is access for these energy industries to those programs.” Multiple changes were made to the letter of the law by the Federal Reserve to accommodate Oil and Gas giants, who singlehandedly invited the spread of highly infectious, deadly diseases to our shores by facilitating global trade and the solidification of Global Capital. Originally, The Fed was prohibited from issuing loans to highly indebted companies or companies that intended to use tax revenue to settle their debts, and loans were limited to 150 million dollars. After The Federal Reserve received 4.5 trillion dollars from Congress and The Trump Administration, it went ahead and issued loans to highly indebted companies that intended to use tax revenue to refinance those debts anyway, while increasing the threshold on loan limits by 50 million. It would appear that Congress, The Trump Administration, Democrats, Republicans and American Libertarians tacitly support The Federal Reserve and its extra-Constitutional powers, and any Republican or Libertarian posturing that suggests otherwise is another convenient lie, or opportunity to pipe the electorate full of elaborate mental constructs designed to confuse, divide and enrage.
Perhaps the most glaring oversight in The CARES Act is the utter lack of protections in its Paycheck Protection Program, which was marketed as relief for actual taxpayers employed in small business settings, rather than a handout to shareholders or corporate executives, who’re party to corporate tax-dodging schemes. Private equity firms have been chomping at the bit to plunder public coffers, and they’ve organized a bipartisan lobbying effort to realize their goals. Powerful firms contacted such infamous notables as Jared Kushner, Nancy Pelosi, Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS), who encouraged the Secretary of Treasury to “waive a rule that would normally disqualify ‘equity-backed’ companies, such as ones receiving private-equity or venture capital funding, from winning small-business stimulus funds, because it treats multiple businesses controlled by a single investor as one entity.” Now, any titan of finance with a restaurant, a hotel or franchise in his back pocket can dip his hand into the money bag.
The backroom dealings between capitalists and America’s most notable politicians doesn’t even account for the fact that Hedge Funds were given access to bailout money from the beginning. A coalition of Republican Representatives further weakened provisions in the Act by lobbying The Federal Reserve, requesting that it waive bank regulations, including accounting standards and loan limits, and to lower the community bank leverage ratio from 9 to 8. This single digit change allows community banks to invest more of your deposits in whatever way they please, rather than keep it on hand for safekeeping, and raises the money multiplier for community banking from 10 to 11.5, which means that community banks can now take on more risk than “too-big-to-fail” banks. Of the 489 banks that failed and were resolved by The Obama Administration in the aftermath of the 2008 crises, 480 were community banks, but Republicans seem to think this is the perfect opportunity to encourage your local banker to toy with desperate and dangerous investment strategies.
IT PAYS TO BE RICH
So, what does a “victory . . . for America’s workers” look like, Nancy?
Well, Caterpillar, Black & Decker, Levi Strauss, Steelcase, an office furniture company, and WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) paid out a combined 700 million in dividends to shareholders just prior to mass layoffs and the shuttering of operations. Nikola Motor Company, an electric truck startup spearheaded by its CEO, Trevor Milton, an avid Trump donor, received 4.1 million dollars. Hallador Energy, which employs Trump’s former EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, as a lobbyist, received 10 million dollars. Easypost, supposedly a logistics company, obtained “a few million dollars.” The company’s founder, Jarret Streebin, donated 105,600 dollars to Donald Trump’s election campaign by way of a joint fundraising PAC in 2019. Clay Lacy Aviation, a private jet charter based out of Van Nuys, California, owned by none other than Clay Lacy, a prominent Trump donor, received 27 million dollars in tax payer revenue. Ronald Gidwitz was old plantation blood that moved up to Chicago from Memphis so his old man could expand their family operation before Donald Trump nominated him to the position of US Ambassador to Belgium in 2018. He has since donated 50 grand to Trump’s re-election campaign and over 100 grand to The Republican National Convention, which may explain how he squirreled away 5.5 million dollars of loan money for his family’s HVAC manufacture, Continental Materials Corp.
Phunware, a tech firm that sells code to web-based companies to track their visitors’ digital signature, signed a contract with The Trump Campaign to track the locations of American voters. Leadership at Phunware, which received 2.8 million dollars in bailout funds, intends to profit from the virus by developing software to aid in “dynamic social distancing policy enforcement,” and other postmodern activities that smack of gross violations of basic liberties: “telehealth,” “telemedicine triage,” “push notifications, messaging, dynamic routing, wayfinding, occupancy monitoring, route tracking, interaction tracking, health status tracking, and access control.” Donald Trump probably learned about Phunware from Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, who consulted with them in 2019. Parscale’s company, CloudCommerce, which wheels and deals in elaborate ponzi schemes proliferated on social media, received about 800 thousand dollars from his employer. Ashford Hospitality Trust, which boasts real estate and hospitality portfolios that include The Ritz Carlton in St. Thomas, received 59 million dollars. Ashford Hospitality’s owners, Archie and Monty Bennet, donated nearly half a million dollars to Trump since 2016, and 1.3 million to The Republican Party during the same time period. Trump’s golf partner and dentist, Albert Hazzouri, who refers to the Nero-in-chief as, “Dear King,” received 350 thousand dollars in aid. The law firm of Marc Kasowitz, who represented Trump in the Trump University fraud lawsuit and prevented Trump’s 1990 divorce from being unsealed on the eve of the 2016 election, Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, received up to 10 million dollars in economic aid.
That’s one billion dollars, a small fraction of the loans disbursed by The Federal Reserve, but “the average loan was just over $200,000, and fewer than 1% of the loans under the program were greater than $5 million,” NPR reported, so the aforementioned loan amounts are extraordinary. Sadly, it would be no surprise to the average American if the remainder of the stimulus not allotted to Trump’s allies was instead awarded to the remainder of America’s political benefactors, but a complete list of recipients has yet to be released to the public. Between Congress and The President, I’d wager that there’s at least 7.2 trillion dollars worth of campaign donors of one stripe or another who received bailout funds: the total approximate cost of the first bailout package.
Perhaps the most egregious provision of The CARES Act offers 170 billion dollars of tax savings to real estate moguls, the lion’s share of which has been awarded to individuals who make 1 million dollars or more per annum, people like Trump and his son-in-law. Mr. Milbank summarized it best in The Post.
Of course, we don’t know for sure how Trump could benefit. As you may have heard, he won’t release his tax returns. But we know that the Trump Organization includes hundreds of “pass-through” entities, the type of corporate structure that benefits from the new tax break. We also know that Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have been involved in hundreds of such entities. The windfall is particularly of use to pass-through businesses that lost money in 2018 and 2019 — when the economy was booming but many Trump properties had declining revenue because of Trump’s radioactivity.
We do know The New York Observer is owned by Jared Kushner’s brother-in-law’s investment firm, and was approved for up to 1 million dollars. Kushner’s family also owns up to 40 percent of Princeton Forrestal LLC, real estate holdings for Princeton University’s Corporate Office and Research Complex, which was approved for up to 2 million dollars in bailout funds. The Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy, a nonprofit, religious academy funded by the Kushner family, was approved for 2 million dollars in aid. They even funded their hobbies, like Donald Trump Junior’s little, hydroponics farm, Eden Green Technology, which received up to 350 thousand dollars in future tax revenue.
It would appear rich folk stand to benefit from nearly every aspect of this bill. JP Morgan Chase awarded a loan to nearly every high-income, private, banking customer that claimed a need for one, but only 6 to 20 percent of small retail businesses that applied, received a loan. At best, we can call it a surreptitious tax break for the Trump family in the middle of five-alarm national catastrophe.
THE MORAL VACUUM OF THE UPPER CRUST
So, rich folk took our money; money we haven’t even made.
What are they doing with it?
Funny you should ask, if “funny” is your reaction to a car crash, because for many of us, life today is a choice between laughter or uncontrollable sobbing.
For starters, they’re eating out for free. The central government now allows employees to deduct one hundred percent of their meal costs. Everyone who is already fairly secure in their holdings just received a meal card while at least 1 in 5 children in the country goes hungry. At best, that’s why they’re pushing servers and bartenders to hurry back to work for shit wages in a tipped position in the midst of a coughing plague: they want to eat for free while they jetset around Pandemirica. Kevin Hasset almost certainly echoed their sentiments when he told a live audience on CNN that, “Our human capital stock is ready to work.” Kevin Hasset is a professional yes-man, pyramid bastard and Republican lapdog, although he more closely resembles a gargoyle that perches on the shoulders of would-be leaders, whispering falsehoods and promises in their ears while furiously twirling a diamond betwixt his talons. Kevin Hasset is also the principle detractor of stay-at-home orders endorsed by epidemiologists who counsel the fascist-in-chief’s “inner circle” on matters of public health. He’s the one who peddled a fabricated projection of deaths due to COVID19 that falsely predicted a sharp reduction by mid-May, to the apparent delight of Trump’s son-in-law, the eternal fuckup and genocidal maniac, Jared Kushner.
The Trump Administration, and the echelon of inherited wealth and corporate lackeys who support him, regard us as human cattle, or captives of war, and nothing more. We know the disease is serious because access to testing that’s grossly unavailable to the public was among the first things rich folk purchased, in addition to “hospital-grade filtration systems” and “safe rooms.” They probably paid for their tests with the money they made after they charged Abigail Abrams 35 thousand dollars for her COVID19 treatments, or after they charged Michael Flor, the longest-hospitalized COVID19 patient, 1.1 million dollars for treatment. Trump described preferential treatment for “well-connected” persons in the world of COVID19 testing as, “the story of life.”
That may be the story of a privileged life, someone who knows little more than ease, affluence and avarice, but what about our story?
If the virus doesn’t kill us, we’ll still have to scrape by on crumbs and pitch our phones in the lake to silence the incessant noise of those damned bill collectors. They’re begging their landlords for rent abatement while the politicians they’ve bribed hand us an ultimatum between potential homelessness and starvation if we refuse to break our backs and risk our lives for chump change, or eventual, certain illness, potential death, and the guilt of knowing that we’ve willfully and cavalierly endangered our neighbor’s lives. If I’m not allowed to stay home and grow food under these conditions because someone presumes they have the right to force me into indentured servitude, to rob me of shelter or indiscriminately kill me, I will defend myself. If H&M, Subway, The Mattress Firm and Cheesecake Factory expect rent abatement from their landlords, then it’s nigh time for a rent and mortgage jubilee across the country, and the globe.
Rich folk are paying lobbyists to write letters to the likes of Senator Ted Cruz to orchestrate major, unitilateral changes to the letter of the law. It’s no surprise Pelosi and her “milquetoast” wing of the Democratic party endeavored to bail out the entire lobbying industry when they wrote The HEROES ACT. In a letter to the public, The American Economic Liberties Project warns that the bill 1) bails out corporate lobbyists; 2) bails out political nonprofits that shield the identities of their donors from public scrutiny as they outspend political action committees to influence elections; 3) bails out mortgage servicers, who tipped the first domino in the 2008 mortgage crisis domino chain, 4) subsidizes COBRA premiums, which only helps individuals with employer-funded health insurance packages and fails to address the needs of the remaining 51 percent of the country; 5) fails to provide common sense protections against the formation of mergers and monopolies during this pandemic; 6) includes landlords in a section of the bill intended to address rent and mortgage relief, and since large rental companies can purchase access to power and resources, large landholders are likely to secure the majority of those funds; 7) bails out debt collectors, who are universally reviled; 8) raises SALT deductions by 10,000 dollars, a tax writeoff that mainly benefits married homeowners who gross 100,000 dollars or more per year.
This is Pelosi’s “plan to do what is necessary to deal with the corona crisis and make sure we can get the country back to work and school safely.”
Elon Musk furloughed thousands of factory workers and executed across-the-board pay cuts for all of Tesla’s employees so he could score big on the first, performance-based tranche of his 12-part, 55-billion-dollar compensation package, which netted him 706 million dollars in late April of 2020. Musk shuttered operations and cut employee earnings while carrying water for the denier-in-chief. Tesla’s CEO described stay-at-home orders as “fascist,” parroted Trump on social media when he compelled Americans to “FREE AMERICA NOW!” and predicted that COVID19 would all but disappear by the end of April 2020. So long as Musk keeps yelling in his employees’ ears while he underpays them and claims credit for their innovations, he should continue to be a great success in the world of finance. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, ended hazard pay and double overtime for his workers as he raked in 30 billion while safely nestled in a bunker in New Zealand.
DEATH CULTISTS FLEE TO THEIR BUNKERS
Most of America’s filthy rich fled city and country as the pandemic consumed our states.
They’re quickly fulfilling the narratives of prophetic fiction like H.G. Well’s The Time Machine, and are devolving into an underground hominid species. The global, shelter network, Vivos, has already installed bunkers around the world that accommodate 80, 300, 1000, 5000 persons. Bezos fled to New Zealand in late February, right around the time Donald Trump was proliferating the deadly lie that COVID19 is a “hoax” perpetrated by The Democratic Party. It’s no wonder The Trump Administration’s response to the pandemic was so grievously delayed: he was buying the upper crust time to flee the country. Lo and behold, New Zealand fashioned and administered among the highest COVID19 test per capita rates in the world, second only to The Vietnamese, who cemented their reputation and ability to oust American empire a long time ago. New Zealand also closed its border to all but Australian citizens and veritably eliminated the disease from the island by the 8th of June while The United States descended into a state of upheaval that will likely trigger a “second wave” of outbreaks across the country, or just a long, sustained shit-show of pestilence, so the only way an American can visit New Zealand today is if they’re filthy rich, or plan an amphibious, covert landing.
America’s wealthy are more than happy to cower in their bunkers from afar while their jackboots spray germs, rubber bullets and tear gas canisters at real Americans under the guise of law and order. Others may have weathered the storm here in The United States, but not without the protection of politicians they buy and sell at auction, who authorize the use of force by police departments compromised by fascist infiltrators. The rich leverage corporate power to dominate our social lives, impoverish our communities and monopolize our politics to spare themselves every hardship. The population of Southhampton increased by 40,000 persons, rental prices in The Hudson Valley appreciated by 350 percent, and communities in Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Block Island, Cook County, Michigan, and elsewhere expressed concern that the influx of individuals in their communities with disposable income would burden their healthcare systems in the event of an outbreak. David Geffen of Geffen Records cruised The Earth’s oceans in his 570 million dollar megayacht, which he flaunted on social media in the immediate aftermath of a pandemic that would claim thousands of American lives on a daily basis.
THE DEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT CONSIDERS US A THREAT
Rich Democrats like Laura and John Arnold, who earned his billions at the fraudulent enterprise, Enron, took the extra goose step in 2016 to fund a prototype, surveillance policing program 1,446 miles from their alleged home in Houston. The company funded by The Arnolds is Persistent Surveillance Systems, owned by Ross McNutt, whose company flies three loud, aerial, surveillance planes over the city of Baltimore in a loop that catalogues a detailed record of every resident’s movements in a 32 square mile radius every second, utilizing a digital display that has been described as “Google Earth with TeeVo.”
Who and what are these people afraid of?
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot raised the canal bridges surrounding Chicago’s Loop and utilized The Illinois National Guard to shelter only the wealthiest parts of Chicago during riots that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by four police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yuppies wined and dined on patios while vigilantes responded to attacks(2) by Nazi provocateurs(3) and desperate opportunists on predominantly working-class, minority neighborhoods,(4) a pattern that was repeated in 140 cities across the country on The 31st of May, the 99th anniversary of a racially-charged massacre of up to 300 African-Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. Tulsa, Oklahoma also happens to be the city Trump chose to be the re-launch of his re-election campaign after American politicians conned half The American People into believing what the provocateur-in-chief told his supporters in February of 2020 : COVID19 is a hoax perpetrated by the Democratic Party to sully his image. Alderman Raymond Lopez of Chicago’s 15th Ward described the looting, arson, armed robbery and home invasions that characterized riots on Chicago’s Southwest Side as a “coordinated . . .attack” in which “hundreds of people, caravans, driving in from Indiana and other places . . . terrorize[d] our city” on social media, which he gathered from police scanners that reported the events as the violence unfolded. Xavier Ramey, a prominent activist in Chicago’s African American community, made a similar observation on the damage to the perception of peaceful protesters in the wake of that bloody Sunday.
This moment has been coopted to a degree, and now it’s being USED by people who are NOT out here protesting against police brutality, they are taking advantage of a situation and though I understand it, it’s not in the name or methods of protest, so it just breaks my heart. We know these white groups are in Chicago, looting and breaking and distracting from the work to elevate black lives. We know some of the youth in black and brown communities are looting as well.
While Mr. Ramey encouraged neighbors to observe each other’s mental health, safety and access to nourishment, Alderman Lopez described the situation to the mayor, who said he was “full of shit” before referring to him as an intellectual inferior. Mayor Lightfoot’s only loyalty was to Chicago’s empty commercial district and her campaign donors, who she girded with soldiers in armored vehicles while the rest of the city burned.
BIG PHARMA CASHES IN BIG ON HUMAN SUFFERING
Meanwhile, Pharmaceutical companies have been making a killing in the world of privatized medicine. Johnson & Johnson received a 456 million dollar contract from The Trump Administration to work on “a new vaccine asset.” Maybe Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, an ardent Trump loyalist, can define “vaccine asset” to The American public. French National, Stephane Bancel, CEO of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech company, Moderna, the first company to begin human trials of a COVID19 vaccine on March 16th, has seen his net worth double since the onset of the pandemic. Gustavo Denegri of Italy, who claims a 45 percent stake in the biotech company, Diasorin, saw his net worth increase by 32 percent. Seo Jung-Jin of South Korea, cofounder of the biopharmaceutical company, Celltrion, saw his net worth increase by 22 percent. Alain Merieux, owner of the diagnostictic arm of Institute Merieux, Biomerieux, saw his net worth increase by 25 percent. Maja Oeri of Switzerland, who owns 5 percent of Roche Pharma, a former Nazi collaborator, saw her net worth increase by 10 percent. Leonard Schleifer of The United States, cofounder of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, saw his net worth increase by 10 percent. George Yancopoulos, chief scientific officer of Regeneron, who is also from The States, saw his net worth increase by 14 percent. Billionaire twins Thomas and Andreas Struengmann of Germany, who are together the majority shareholders of BioNTech, each saw their net worth increase by 11 percent.
42 million Americans lose their jobs in the midst of a pandemic, The NASDAQ hits a new high and these billionaires rake in a windfall on the commodification of life and death.
LYING, CHEATING, POLITICAL SCUM
The private sector was not the only beneficiary of the pandemic. At least six Senators, four Republicans and two Democrats have been accused of insider training, and all but Senator Burr will skate free because someone else dropped stock and rearranged their portfolios for them. Senator Feinstein (D-CA), Representative Susan Davis (D-Calif.), Senator Loeffler (R-GA), Senator Perdue (R-GA), and Senator Inhofe (R-OH) enjoy the cover of plausible deniability. Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), on the other hand, needs to return to white collar crime school and retake the training module, Fall guys: how to pick em; how to use em, or he could take a few lessons from the pederast-in-chief, who built his career on scapegoating family, friends and advisors for his crimes and misdeeds.
On January 24th, The Senate was briefed by “top administration health officials regarding the novel coronavirus outbreak that was first detected in Wuhan, China.” Between January 28th and February 18th of 2020, Senator Feinstein’s banker husband, Richard Blum, sold between 1 and 5 million dollars of stock in Allogene Therapeutics, a biotech company specializing in cancer therapies. Share prices in Allogene dipped by 5 dollars in the aftermath of the pandemic, but have doubled in price since Senator Feinstein’s husband dumped stock in the company. Blum is probably kicking himself in the ass for that one, so he’s either an inept criminal or piss-poor investor. Representative Susan Davis dumped several thousands dollars of stock in Alaska Air and Royal Caribbean cruises.
27 out of 29 of the market transactions conducted by Senator Loeffler and her husband between January 24th and mid-February consisted of the sale of stock. Of the remaining two transactions, one was a 250-thousand dollar purchase of stock in Citrix, a teleworking IT company uniquely suited to profit during a pandemic so severe, it demands we sequester in our homes. Stock prices of Citrix have since increased by 20 dollars on average. Senator Perdue made 10 different stock purchases amounting to 185 thousand dollars in the longtime chemical and PPE manufacture, DuPont, between January 24th and March 2nd, in addition to 66 additional purchases and 825 thousand dollars in sales over 34 transactions. It was a mad flurry of activity compared to the prior month. Senator Perdue’s market activity jumped nearly threefold. Among his many purchases was a fifty-thousand dollar stake in Netflix. Senators Loeffler and Perdue were later tapped by The Trump Administration to join his bipartisan Committee on Reopening The Economy.
Senator Inhofe made some rather large, conspicuous transactions, pulling 400-thousand dollars in stock from companies like Paypal and Intuit, a tax-preparation, software developer: businesses that require an economy that includes participation by the entire public to remain profitable. Inhofe later invested up to 100 thousand dollars in an assets management company with a predictably boring name: Brookfield. He probably knew the only remaining profitable business in post-COVID America would be the gigantic, corporate slush fund of inscrutably abstract “market products” traded on an index that counts any instance of the common man’s suffering as a step in the right direction.
Senator Richard Burr, one of three Senators who voted against a 2012 bill that outlawed insider trading, dumped between 628 thousand and 1.7 million dollars of stock over 33 separate transactions, including up to 250 thousand dollars in hospitality stock, all on February 13th. His brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, dumped mostly oil and tobacco stock to the tune of 280 thousand dollars on the same day. 9 days later, on February 27th, Burr warned an appropriately named group of Death Cultists who call themselves, “The Tar Heel Circle,” that they should take a close look at their employees and ask themselves whether or not they’re worth losing. Attendees consisted exclusively of representatives from corporations and organizations in North Carolina that donated more than 100 grand to Burr’s 2016 re-election campaign. “There will be, I’m sure, times that communities, probably some in North Carolina, have a transmission rate where they say, ‘Let’s close schools for two weeks. Everybody stay home,’” Burr said two weeks prior to his state’s decision to close schools. On the same day that North Carolina’s Senator met with his Tar Heels, Trump claimed COVID19 would miraculously disappear one day. Seven days later, Burr confidently reassured the public that “we have a framework in place that has put us in a better position than any other country to respond to a public health threat, like the coronavirus,” which was a bold-faced lie. What he meant to say was, “We’re going to lull you into a false sense of security, then encourage you to return to work and kill each other because we, The Ruling American Establishment, enjoy toying with your lives and profiting from your subjugation too damned much to stop.”
Burr must have been chosen by his cohorts to be their patsy, or perhaps he’s just particularly well-suited for the job. Anyone with a lick of street smarts could have told him to refrain from dumping that much stock on the same day as his brother-in-law. The Senator has since been served a warrant, abandoned his chair at the head of The Senate Intelligence Committee and is currently under investigation, but no one today would be surprised if he skirts the law and retires on some mountaintop bunker. America’s senators and congressmen enjoy the same general, wide-ranging and comprehensive immunity as brutalizing police officers.
THE RULING, AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT REVISITS COLONIAL “SMALLPOX BLANKET” DIPLOMACY
Boiler-room politicking intended to maintain revenue flow for bloated monopolies with a complete disregard for human life characterized most political rhetoric in The United States in March and April of 2020. On March 22nd, the colonizer-in-chief wrote, “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” on social media. Who is, “We,” and why would we chose to imperil our lives for a fraudulent, murdering economy predicated on the successes of entrenched wealth? Trump even admitted that “reopening” the economy would be “bad” because deaths “are going to increase with time,” but he wanted to “reopen” the economy anyway because it would be “good for our workers.” The doctors, he said, would “‘shut down the entire world . . . for a couple of years.’ You know, we can’t do that.”
Why?
Why can’t we do that?
An economy as brittle, calcified and decrepit as this old plantation home isn’t worth saving.
Even the industrious and innovative Germans couldn’t “reopen” their economy without their daily caseload tripling, although they’ve since made significant progress compared to America’s murderous politicians, but if global trade resumes with the same vigor as the world’s Pre-COVID economy, the super strains emerging around the world will send us back into our domiciles yet again. Such aggressively misleading rhetoric was repeated by a broad swath of The Ruling Establishment during the peak of infection during the first wave of the ongoing pandemic, which lingers in our fraught, ailing and divided states. The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, a Republican, blatantly prioritized corporate profits over American lives.
There are more important things than living, and that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us, and I don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die, but, man, we gotta take some risks and get back in the game, and get this country back up and running.
Mayor Carolyn Goodman, a Democrat, passed the buck on public health to the private sector.
The free enterprise needs to be able to make sure that what you offer the public meets the needs of the public right now. We’re in a crises, heath-wise, and so, for a restaurant to be open, or a small boutique to be open, they better figure it out. That’s their job; not the mayor’s job . . . I want the city open.
In response to testimony by Dr. Fauci, spokesman for The White House Coronavirus Task Force, The Republican Senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, accused all epidemiologists for having made “wrong prediction after wrong prediction,” then chastened the doctor, saying, “we ought to have a little bit of humility in our belief that we know what’s best for the economy.” Fauci’s retort is one for the history books.
I don’t give advice about economic things. I don’t give advice about anything other than public health. The second thing is that you used the word, “We should be humble about what we don’t know.” And I think that falls under the fact that we don’t know everything about this virus, and we really better be very careful, particularly when it come to children, because the more and more we learn, we’re seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn’t see from the studies in China, or in Europe . . . for example, right now, children presenting with COVID19 actually have a very strange inflammatory syndrome, very similar to Kawasaki Syndrome. I think we better be careful that we are not cavalier in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects . . . I am very careful and hopefully humble in knowing that I don’t know everything about this disease, and that’s why I’m very reserved about making broad predictions.
In leaked audio, The Governor of Texas, Greg Abbot, another Republican, admitted that The Ruling Establishment never intended to eliminate the virus. Their goal was to coo vague reassurances in our ears, or to compel us with animated hyperbole into a rally cry to save an economy that prioritizes profit over life or living.
How do we know reopening businesses won’t result in faster spread of COVID19? Listen, the fact of the matter is, pretty much every scientific and medical report shows that whenever you have a reopening . . . that it actually will lead to an increase in spread. It’s almost ipso facto . . . The goal never has been to get COVID-19 transmission down to zero. It never can be to keep transmission down to zero because there’s always going to be, with a rapidly transmittable disease like this, there will always be a level of transmission . . . The goal is to reopen using strategies, that are proven strategies that can continue to contain the spread of COVID-19. These are strategies that have proven effective in the state of Texas for the past month and a half.
By mid June, Texas already pursued an aggressive “reopening” of their economy despite having one of the highest, climbing infection rates in the country. The litte, pudgy, vermillion-hued tyrant in The White House ran a victory lap in an officious spectacle contrived on the 11th of May in front of banners that proclaimed,“AMERICA LEADS THE WORLD IN TESTING,” and said that his administration “prevailed” in the fight against COVID19. At the time, The United States had tested fewer individuals per capita than 21 other nations. One month later, our country remains a frothing vat of pestilence with the highest rate of infection in the world and a death toll equal to 3 Vietnam Wars and counting, but the saboteur-in-chief insisted on reopening the economy because he was excited about a “good fourth quarter.” How 51 Republican Senators could vote against expanded, paid sick leave during a crises as grave as this is beyond the scope of moral understanding. How all these politicians, Republican and Democrat, could lead Americans like sheep to the slaughter to cushion some sociopath’s ego is beyond the scope of normal understanding, but Mnuchin’s deadline to “reopen” “later in The Summer” will not brake for human life.
DONALD TRUMP RECEIVES HIS INSTRUCTIONS
Why would the curmudgeon-in-chief wantonly and recklessly send The American People into harm’s way for a contrived socioeconomic arrangement hellbent on ushering in a new, corporate, twenty-first century serfdom? On March 24th, just seven days after The Executive issued stay-at-home orders across the country, the sycophant-in-chief and his lapdog, Pence, held a conference call with Ken Griffin, CEO of the investment firm, Citadel; Dan Loeb, CEO of the hedge fund, Third Point; Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the largest private equity firm in the world, The Blackstone Group; Robert Smith, CEO of the private equity firm, Vista Equity; Jeffrey Sprecher, the postmodern J.P. Morgan, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and CEO of a company that veritably owns the stock market, Intercontinental Exchange; and Paul Tudor Jones, hedge fund manager and co-founder of Just Capital, who built his career on whitewashing corporate-funded resource extraction with polished marketing campaigns. Prior to the call, Trump was busy casting himself as a valiant, wartime president while proliferating conspiracy theories, promising miracle cures and making derogatory remarks about Chinese people. He also deflected criticism for his administration’s gross negligence during the first two months of the pandemic onto The World Health Organization, which he subsequently defunded, to the detriment of all of Yemen, which suffered an 80 percent reduction in humanitarian aid as a result of the administration’s decision. Trump’s superiors on Wall Street cleared up any doubts he may have harbored about the path forward. After the conference call with his de facto constituency, the stooge-in-chief held a “virtual town hall” on Fox News to pass the decision down to The Horde. “I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” Trump said.
How did he rationalize this madness?
Look, you’re going to lose a number of people to the flu,(5) but you’re going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression. You’re going to lose people. You’re going to have suicides by the thousands. You’re going to have all sorts of things happen. You’re going to have instability. You can’t just come in and say, “Let’s close up the United States of America.”
. . . when you [close up the country], as soon as you do it, you’re going to drop — I mean, they’re talking about 20 or 25 points of GDP. Nobody’s ever heard of 25 points. If we went down a point, that’s a big deal. Now, all of a sudden, you’re basically turning off the country.
Trump is an enemy of The American People, and a danger to The United States, but more than that, he’s a tool. The American People face a greater enemy than Trump. We face the conniving, self-absorbed, manipulative sociopaths on that conference call. Stephen Moore and Art Laffer personally lobbied Trump for more than a week prior to his push to remove stay-at-home orders, which Trump issued only after several governors already upstaged the sales-item-in-chief. Stephen Moore is a child labor advocate who doesn’t believe economic policy should be guided by the man-made threat of global climate change. “I’m a radical on this,” he has said, “I’d get rid of a lot of these child labor laws. I want people to start working at 11.” Stephen Moore is also the coordinator for numerous right-wing, astroturf campaigns that work with CNP Action, which has ties to Nazi propagandists with corporate funding who call themselves “The National Policy Institute.” Art Laffer is an American economist and professional yes-man who believes markets crashed in 2008 in anticipation of Barack Obama’s presidency despite the well-documented, historical and universally recognized causes of the 2008 recession: namely, the intransigence of ratings agencies that encouraged the systemic rot of overrated, toxic, collateral debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities to metastasize across the whole of the banking sector. He also forecasted markets crashing if Bernie Sanders were elected President, and has been credited with a metric not of his own devise, called, “The Laffer Curve,” which measures the amount governments can tax corporations before tax revenues plateau after those companies stop projecting profits by directing revenue into tax havens, or by off-shoring production, which is neither legal nor practical for the common man or woman.
THE RULING, AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT SABOTAGES THE UNITED STATES
What do you call a generation willing to sacrifice its children to satisfy the urge to indulge in compulsive self-adulation? Ignorance, abuse and neglect are the only valid excuses for America’s elder class, and World Capital is an abusive society of predators who prey on ignorant people while posing as negligent caretakers. In the words of Kevin Hasset, The Ruling Order of World Capital views us as little more than “human capital stock,” and now they’re paying The Trump Administration to inform his supporters that he wants to imprison individuals opposed to fascism using Nazi iconography in official campaign statements. Their disdain for human life is manifest. Secretary of Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, called the mushrooming rise in jobless claims, “not relevant,” and told everyone in the country to survive on 17 dollars a day. Now, The Trump Administration and Mitch McConnell are seeking to shield companies from legal liability for dereliction of safety protocols to protect from COVID19. Alabama, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, Illinois, Louisiana, Ohio, South Carolina and Wyoming have already issued executive orders or passed legislation that allows employers to commit acts of criminal negligence.
Trump’s electoral strategy was to kill off the political opposition, for fuck’s sake, which is considered genocide in most places on Earth that aren’t overrun with turncoats, Russian spies and Trump supporters. How is The Republican Party going to claim the moral high-ground now? Will they double-down on their campaign of murder? Will Democrats make doormats out of themselves for the jackboots?
The Koch Network and FreedomWorks have painted boogeyman of trial lawyers, who propagandists accuse of “plot[ting] to line their pockets with Covid-19 related lawsuits” in the pursuit of “predatory, self-serving” interests. Meanwhile, corporate lawyers are hatching plots to further defund governments across the world by suing them for the implementation of quarantine measures. Emboldened fascists like Paul Hymas, the proud owner of Nacho Daddy, have taken it upon themselves to obligate their employees to sign liability waivers. “We really do just want to serve nachos,” said Hymas. Josh Cunningham, Labor expert for The National Conference of State Legislatures, said, “As states look to reignite their economies, it’s possible that the risk of being sued by a customer or employee who is exposed to COVID-19 will dissuade some businesses from reopening.” The NCSL is a self-described “nonpartisan” organization of legislators from across the country who meet for some inexplicable reason that they justify with obtuse, nondescript language. These people live in some toxic head space far removed from the everyday reality of most Americans.
It’s really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen. The consumer is ready, and the consumer is so powerful in our country with what we’ve done with tax cuts and regulation cuts and all of those things. The consumer has never been in a better position than they are right now.
That’s a little excerpt of Donald Trump patting himself on the shoulder for effectively lowering tax rates on high-income earners below the rate for working people. Today, the consumer is jobless or has expired due to the rapist-in-chief’s ambivalence and penchant for crimes against humanity. Make no mistake, such gross negligence is a crime committed by a government, perpetrated upon its people, and this pattern is repeating around the world. These people have convinced themselves that if they all conduct the same crime at the same time, no one will notice the hypocrisy and abject cruelty of it all. No steward of the public trust will endanger the public he or she serves to satisfy some unspoken fealty to a pre-existing arrangement of fabricated laws and contrived, economic structures that can easily be rearranged. Our so-called representatives are not stewards of the public trust. That’s why Trump wants to defund Social Security and Medicare by cutting payroll taxes. Some of the largest coal companies in the country are lobbying Congress to defund the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, which is replenished by an excise tax on coal. In the midst of a global pandemic, after suffering the worst job losses since The Great Depression, the greatest depreciation of gross domestic product in U.S. history, and a fascist coup, the stock market is booming.
THE RULING, AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT EXHIBITS A DEPRAVITY THAT CHALLENGES THE HUMAN IMAGINATION
It’s not like there aren’t viable alternatives to state-sponsored terror and oppression. Even among spineless Democrats, a group has offered notable legislation founded on principles of mutual aid. The progressive wing of the party pushed for a moratorium on evictions and mortgage payments, and recurring, deficit-neutral, monthly payments of 2,000 dollars, and an additional 1,000 for families with children. The mechanism to fund the proposal is identical to the device found in The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 — bypass The Federal Reserve and pull the money straight out of The Mint — but the legislation was curiously absent from Pelosi’s HEROES Act despite all the noise Democrats made about a Green New Deal, a morally-vacuous initiative that bears no resemblance to FDR-era labor policy and would only succeed in pumping money into technologies that destroy the planet, yet are touted as a climate crises cure-all. And let us not forget that workers didn’t lose their jobs in other countries, and companies that use tax havens were excluded from economic relief in other countries, and workers in other countries don’t fret endlessly as they debate between eating and suffocating to death every time they go to work because their government veritably eliminated the presence of COVID19 from their towns and cities.
Anyone who fucks over their entire species is of no importance and should probably be deposited on a remote island(6) somewhere with no possibility of escape. Anyone who fucks over their entire species for a percentage while feigning ignorance is testing the limits of imagination. Even Noam Chomsky was taxed with the challenge of quantifying such a gross betrayal of the human spirit.
I don’t know what word in the language — I can’t find one — that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal — the existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The Word ‘evil’ doesn’t begin to approach it.
The only reasonable conclusion is that these lords and ladies, besotted on their own sense of self-importance, are parasitic interlopers from an alien Hellscape floating in a parallel universe forged from pure evil, whose only pleasure is to feed our children to the dark, twisted, two-headed, blood idol more commonly referred to as, “the stock market.”
(1) The initial 4.5 trillion dollars in The CARES Act, its 2.9 trillion dollar second installment.
(2)
~ https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/05/31/little-village-residents-stand-guard-at-street-corners-they-dont-want-anyone-looting-or-tearing-their-community-apart/
~ https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/06/04/bridgeporters-say-bat-wielding-vigilantes-are-terrorizing-peaceful-protesters-neighbors/
~ https://www.wbez.org/stories/tensions-after-looting-lead-to-new-efforts-at-black-and-latino-unity/5f98b46c-c439-428d-b48e-db23b8ac2b6f
(3)
~ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/racially-motivated-violent-extremism-isis-national-threat-priority-fbi-director-christopher-wray/
~ https://theintercept.com/2020/06/02/history-united-states-government-infiltration-protests/
~ https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/antifa-trump-fbi/
~ https://www.businessinsider.com/3-boogaloo-men-terror-charges-george-floyd-protest-riot-conspiracy-2020-6
~ https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/06/02/north-carolina-protest-shooting-suspect-appears-have-ties-organized-neo-confederacy-hate
~ https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-facebook-disinformation-george-floyd-unrest-politifact-2020-6
~ https://www.frontpagelive.com/2020/06/04/white-arsonists-george-floyd-protests/
~ https://www.justsecurity.org/70497/far-right-infiltrators-and-agitators-in-george-floyd-protests-indicators-of-white-supremacists/
~https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkyb9b/far-right-extremists-are-hoping-to-turn-the-george-floyd-protests-into-a-new-civil-war
~https://www.lawfareblog.com/riots-white-supremacy-and-accelerationism
~ https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/05/30/outsiders-extremists-are-among-those-fomenting-violence-in-twin-cities
~ https://www.startribune.com/officials-see-extremist-groups-disinformation-in-protests/570908042/
(4)
~ https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/austin-protests-looters-businesses-destroyed/269-2981404a-0278-4039-aa87-7d2802a76e0d
~ https://www.wsj.com/articles/looting-is-second-blow-for-reeling-businesses-especially-in-minority-neighborhoods-11591214595
~ https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/artists-are-raising-funds-for-black-owned-businesses-subjected-to-looting-060220
~ https://wgntv.com/news/chicago-news/as-small-businesses-across-chicago-get-looted-or-damaged-fundraising-campaigns-aim-to-help/
~ https://mckinleypark.news/news/604-looting-arson-attempted-home-invasions-mar-mckinley-park-neighborhood
~ https://www.wbez.org/stories/after-unrest-grocery-options-become-scarcer-on-chicagos-south-side/175aac5e-85ad-444e-9615-690044cfd949
~ https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2020/6/1/21276893/chicago-protests-looting-aldermen-national-guard-troops-protect-neighborhoods
~ https://www.fox6now.com/news/many-milwaukee-businesses-damaged-by-vandals-during-violent-protests-are-minority-owned
~ https://denver.cbslocal.com/2020/06/01/colfax-minority-businesses-violence/
~ https://www.kxan.com/austin-george-floyd-mike-ramos-protests/which-businesses-in-austin-were-looted-and-vandalized/
~ https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/looters-hit-popular-black-owned-business-in-buckhead
~ https://www.startribune.com/riots-arson-leave-minnesota-communities-of-color-devastated/570921492/
~ https://www.gofundme.com/f/uff8a5-rebuild-south-minneapolis
~ https://6abc.com/philly-protest-looting-philadelphia-riots/6225306/
~ https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/business-needs-help-after-ransack-during-columbus-protests
(5) It should be patently obvious to everyone that COVID19 is several degrees more transmissible and dangerous than the flu by now.
(6) See Bastøy Prison.
